Ray Dorset, singer, songwriter
I still had a day job at a lab when the melody for In the Summertime entered my head. The lyric took 10 minutes to write. When I was young, my family always went to Hayling Island, Hampshire, for vacations; big business with about 20 of us. That I, for a part of the song, reminded myself of beautiful childhood memories. “In the summer, when the weather is high” means high pressure, when it is not raining and you have that feeling of euphoria, where you feel “you can immediately stretch up and touch the air”. Singing “drink, walk” simply means a cook, a coffee or a milkshake in the days before drinking became a generic term for alcohol.
Rhythmically, the song was a mix of skiffle, Caribbean and Latin American that I have ever loved since I heard Edmundo Ros on the radio with my mom. But it sounded great when we went into Pye’s Studio One to record it in 1970, so we added a lot of percussive effects. The sound of the jug band came from Paul King blowing into a glass bottle while he was playing banjo. I stamped my feet on a piece of wood, a bit like John Lee Hooker. I went: “Ch-ch-ch-UH / Ch-ch-ch-UH,” and I’m told it was the first beatbox sound on a hit record.
Listen to the original version of In the Summertime.
The single went straight away, right in at No. 13. We did Disco 2, the forerunner of BBC2’s The Old Gray Whistle Test, recorded at Shepherd’s Bush. Immediately after the rehearsal upstairs, we had to run downstairs for the filming, due to be aired that evening. Thirteen of us stepped into the elevator, which was half stuck, and which panicked, we would not arrive on time.
Then it went to No. 1. I was still at the lab and people upstairs who had never spoken to me before wanted to be friends. I would go to the factory floor and all the women would chase me. It was a complete madhouse. When I look back at the single’s performance clips, I see that I have this big grin and I wear clothes that make no sense at all, with these massive sidebars, while the other guys in the band have a fitting hippy look . I think I tried to relate everything to nature and spontaneity. For me, it was always about the groove and the atmosphere, not about technical mastery but about seeing how many notes you can play, which leaves me cold.
Barry Murray, producer
When Pye Records started their underground label, Dawn, one of the first things I did was sign Ray Dorset. Previously, I was a gig-booker for a few agencies and Ray always had me under the impression. Whatever set-up he had, he always produced terribly rhythmic, syncopated music.
Mungo Jerry was a four-part, drumless band, with a stand-up bass (Mike Cole) and a piano (Colin Earl). They had signed on to make an album, because in those days that was what underground bands did. They did not want a big single, because it was forbidden to him commercially. But they had to support an album by building a sequel and I knew a successful single could achieve that.
Ray played me song after song, earmarking what would be good in the album context. But when he did in the summer, initially at the right time, I knew right away that it was a hit single.
The recording is full of heels, vibrations and figures. It has that Brazilian baião-type rhythm, which [Jerry] Leiber en [Mike] Stoller used on Stand By Me. Double track of Ray’s voice on alternating lines was an old Elvis ploy.
But two minutes into the session, the band stopped playing. I asked why and Ray said, “That’s all we have.” Making the record longer meant greater performance royalties for each radio game, so because Pye’s library for sound effects was expensive, I hired engineer Howard Barrow to build his Triumph TR4 in the street. I stood there with a microphone under the exhaust pipe, giving myself practical carbon monoxide poisoning. But we edited the car sound on the tape and copied the first part of the song, with a slightly different mix, on the back. The single is actually the same song that is played twice.
It sold 112.00 copies in one afternoon. But what is often lost in the story is what a phenomenal live band Mungo Jerry were. They made the front page of Melody Maker with the headline “Mungomania” not based on In the Summertime, but for a performance the weekend before they blew the Grateful Dead, Free and Black Sabbath off the stage at the Newcastle-Under-Hollywood Festival Lyme. It was surreal, but despite worries they would be the biggest one-hit miracle of all time, they were back on top with Baby Jump a few months later.
In the Summertime sold 30m copies; not even the Beatles did that. But for me, a hit is always redolent of a place in time. That was my greatest satisfaction: that in future decades, when people heard that track, they remembered the summer of 1970.
• Mungo Jerry’s new single, The Lockdown Song, and the new album, Touch the Sky, are available at mungojerry.com.
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